Yahoo not liable for blocking marketing email

Plaintiff provides email marketing services for its clients. It sends out millions of emails a day, many of those to recipients having Yahoo email addresses. Yahoo used its spam filtering technology to block many of the messages plaintiff was trying to send to Yahoo account users. So plaintiff sued Yahoo, alleging various causes of action such as intentional interference with prospective business advantage.

Yahoo moved to dismiss, arguing, among other things, that it was immune from liability under Section 230(c)(2) of the Communications Decency Act. The court granted the motion to dismiss.

Section 230(c)(2) provides, in relevant part, that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of … any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”

Plaintiff argued that immunity should not apply here because Yahoo acted in bad faith by using “faulty filtering technology and techniques,” motivated “by profit derived from blocking both good and bad e-mails.” But the court found no factual basis to support plaintiff’s allegations that Yahoo used “cheap and ineffective technologies to avoid the expense of appropriately tracking and eliminating only spam email.”

The court rejected another of plaintiff’s arguments against applying Section 230, namely, that Yahoo should not be afforded blanket immunity for blocking legitimate business emails. Looking to the cases of Goddard v. Google and National Numismatic Certification v. eBay, plaintiff argued that the court should apply the canon of statutory construction known as ejusdem generis to find that legitimate business email should not be treated the same as the more nefarious types of content enumerated in Section 230(c)(2). (Content that is, for example, obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing).

On this point the court looked to the sheer volume of the purported spam to conclude Yahoo was within Section 230’s protection to block the messages — plaintiff acknowledged that it sent approximately six million emails per day through Yahoo’s servers and that at least .1% of those emails either were sent to invalid addresses or resulted in user opt-out. On an annual basis, that amounted to more than two million invalid or unwanted emails.

Evan Brown is an attorney in Chicago helping businesses and individuals identify and manage issues dealing with technology development, copyright, trademarks, domain names, software licensing, service agreements and other matters involving the internet and new media.

Evan is a partner in the law firm of Much Shelist, P.C. He is an adjunct professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and is a Domain Name Panelist with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).